Pragma Keep Partners On Course

Today, Pragma hosted its annual partner conference with its major vendors and resellers as thank you for their efforts over the last twelve months, but also to arm them with the knowledge and porfotlio to tackle the future.

Bridgid Nzekwu, renowned ITV news presenter, handled the proceedings and welcomed members of Pragma, and their major vendors, to the stage to present their vision for Channel partners in 2017 and beyond.

Tim Brooks, Managing Director of Pragma, kicked off the proceedings with a warm welcome and thanked partners for helping them achieve 30% growth for the second year running. He also welcomed some of their newer vendors which were helping partners develop their propositions and move into different areas, whilst also creating new revenue streams.

Brooks put Pragma’s impressive growth down to some key SME wins and exclaimed “In a declining market, we are still growing our on-premise business.”

He also stated, “Ericsson LG will remain at the core of our proposition moving forwards and we will also remain 100% Channel organisation. We will never create a direct business.”

Ahed Alkhatib, VP of Global Sales at Ericsson LG, also took to the stage to showcase the company’s product roadmap for 2017 and to also explain where they are investing.

He said, “We want to make a commitment to our partners today, we are a vendor that recognizes the world is changing and we will do everything to ensure we give you the right tools to succeed.”

Alkhatib outlined his investment plans for WebRTC, once the standards are ratified, and said “we’ll be ready when that happens”. He also mentioned they would be improving their applications and management portals too this year.

Speaking to new vendor partner SoWifi at the event, Daniel Bisley, CFO, said “Take up has been good considering we have only been with Pragma for about a year now. The product allows partners to have a different type of conversation with their customer’s which has really helped them get into new businesses. The SoWifi product is really aimed at anywhere that has a collection of people who need to get online. That could be restaurants, pubs or retail outlets. Customer’s use their social media accounts to log onto the wifi and we collect that data which enables the venue to target their customer’s with marketing in future. Traditionally that has been hard for those types of establishments to achieve.”

Pragma partner, Cloudsource, spoke to Comms Business at the event. Paul Mahon, Sales Director said, “Today is about making sure we are future-proofing our business.”

During the evening, Pragma presented its awards to the most successful partners during a lavish dinner at the Belfry. The hopefuls were all eager to walk away with something to decorate the mantelpiece.